Profile

Sandy Herrold used to call herself the Fannish Butterfly; I'm more like the Fannish Great Turtle. I like to dig into a fandom and stay for a couple of years. (I have a very long attention span.) I'm also a big builder of fannish infrastructure: I like to joke that, by the time I get into a fandom, the explorers have all been and gone. Julad's been there but there's no sign of her (sometimes there's a small flag), and I can still see maybe a little smoke from astolat's covered-over campfire. I come in with the fans who are settlers and start building town: post-office, railway station, saloon, hotel, couple of theatres. I guess I'm what you might call a third-wave writer. I founded a lot of communities in DS and SGA: DSReporter , ds_noticeboard, ds_flashback, ds_flashfiction and their SGA variants, and I still mod a lot of them; I also mod a couple of Dead Zone communities as well. I'm really pleased that so many fandoms have adopted the flashfiction model and the community rules I developed; it's something I'm actually really proud of.

I was in fandom before the internet and gafiated, but I came back in about 1996-1997. My primary fandom was The Sentinel from 1997-2000 (writing as Cesca or Francesca; 89 stories), Due South from 2000 - 2005 (64 stories), and Stargate Atlantis from about 2005 to now (36? maybe?) The numbers might indicate that I'm writing less, but actually, the stories have gotten longer. I've also written West Wing, Dead Zone, Hard Core Logo, QAFUK and other fandoms. I work with an extensive and terrific set of betas; I'm a huge fan of the beta process. God, they make my stories so much better!! My current roster of betas include: Terri, astolat, julad, kaneko, resonant, and lim, though I've had so many terrific betas in previous fandoms, including Paulette, owlet, Miriam Heddy, & Em Brunson, just to name a few.

I started vidding in about 2005; I learned to vid on a brilliant computer called astolat *g*. Today, I vid by myself and it's a lot harder: there's a huge gap between what I want to do and what I can do, both technically and talent-wise. (I'm like the Eddie Izzard of vidders: it's like, "You're British, scale it back a bit!") But I think each vid I make is a little better than the last one, which is all I ask.

For a long time, I thought I was going to go to my death as the author of something called the Nature Series in TS. Then I wrote a story in DS called Chicago's Most Wanted, and for a long time, that was the story everyone knew me for. Now my tombstone story seems to be Written By The Victors, in SGA. I wrote an essay once called The Next Story After This in which I explained that my fanfiction writing motto is "Well, if they don't like this, maybe they'll like the next one." So really, I just keep swinging and hope, you know, that the first line of my obituary keeps changing!

My best story is the next one after this current one I'm writing; I'm just sure of it!

ETA: Yeah, that turns out to be true. Update from the me, as of 2014 - here I am in Marvel/MCU fandom, and probably the tombstone story will be All The Angels And The Saints, but who knows; I ain't dead yet!